Fear of De Sade

BARON:

. . . When I saw her at the altar, there was no going back. I saw that she wasn’t the woman I’d imagined, of course. At the altar, they never are. And I knew. Marriage is one farce unmasking itself before another, in church, before God. After seven months of pure imagination, I had forgotten the reality I’d only seen once. But I was still blind. Only later, in the bedroom, could I see, in plain daylight, that I’d been betrayed by the cunning strategy she’d trapped me in, minx! The little breasts pressed into the silver corset were no longer there. She wasn’t ugly. No, far from it. She was just a woman, like any other, and not the goddess I’d imagined for seven months. More than anything, because she wanted nothing to do with me. She acted the role of wife unconvincingly, and whenever she could she kept clear of me. The marriage was never consummated. Quite to the contrary of what she wrote during those seven months of absence in her letters inflamed with desire, now all she wanted to do was keep her distance. It was as if suddenly she’d turned around, changed her mind. But that only drove me crazier. I was ready to do anything, to rape her if necessary, if she went on with this act. But before I had the chance, a week after the marriage, she had already gone back to Marseilles, sorting out family matters, as always. She knew how to bargain. She spent all her time keeping her accounts. She calculated everything. And that is what she did with me. She tricked me. The difference was that now she no longer needed to write letters. She was tied to me by marriage. She’d got what she wanted. She didn’t need to keep the flame of desire alive. During the fifteen years of marriage, we spent most of the time apart. You can’t take anything with you from this world, so make the most of it, and that’s what I’ve done. Straightaway I saw the convenience of the situation, and what she was proposing to me in her silent self-removal: proving that God doesn’t exist. I was to go on with my libertine existence and leave her in peace, and in exchange I’d have all the alibis of marriage, as would she. It was a kind of contract. She knew how to strike a deal. She got what she wanted. She was getting on. She needed to get married. The parties in the Lagrange château, what was left to me of the ruins, became famous, while the baroness spent her life in the city, taken up by her duties and business affairs, without bothering me. At least that was what she said, although more than once she was seen in Marseilles and Bordeaux, in elegant receptions and dinners, in the company of those people who are still having a good time in spite of the country’s collapse. They were fifteen years of a tacit agreement which was very convenient to me. Until I met Martine, the maid the Count of Suz couldn’t even dream about. The girl I told you about. I planned the Lagrange night only for her.

VOICE:

And the count?

BARON: He appeared that night too, but only at the last moment.

VOICE: No, you numbskull! In those fifteen years! What happened to him in those fifteen years, after the Terror?